I Am Not At State Of The Map 2013 But There Is A Viral Map

Due to the age old cliche of circumstances beyond my control, I can’t be in Birmingham this weekend, despite submitting How To Make A Map Go Viral (In 8 Easy Steps) as a talk for the SOTM conference. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital technology, in other words, a screencast, my talk is still on the conference schedule, even if I’m not.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London’s GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract …

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen’s OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month’s worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media … on a map. It’s also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

When I learned that I wouldn’t be able to go to Birmingham, the conference organisers kindly suggested that maybe I might want to pre-record my talk instead. Which is just what I’ve done. You’ll see it embedded below.

Apart from a few cosmetic changes and updates, it’s the same talk as I gave in April and if you’re interested in my notes and slides, you’ll find them in my write up from April.

If you were lucky enough to have been at SOTM this year, I hope you enjoyed the conference and I hope you enjoyed my talk and that my disembodied voice wasn’t too off putting. This is the first screencast I’ve put together, so be gentle. See you all at SOTM next year. Hopefully.

A self-professed map addict, Gary has worked in the mapping and location space for over 20 years through a combination of luck and occasional good judgement. Gary is co-founder of Malstow Geospatial, which provides handmade, professional geospatial consulting. A Fellow of the RGS, he tweets about maps, writes about them...Read more

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Wasn’t at Geomob and also not able to be at SOTM, so enjoyed the back-story to this interesting viral map. Well done on production – so difficult talking to yourself in this way! Just remember, a live performance has flaws and imperfections and no-one thinks twice about that.